Why Final Fantasy XV's Director Wants To Bring The Game To PC

Final Fantasy XV has become a blockbuster hit on the PlayStation 4 and the Xbox One. The game has sold enough to hopefully make Square Enix happy. However, they're not done yet and director Hajime Tabata wants to port the game to PC.

According to Gematsu, the Weekly Famitsu Japaneese magazine managed to catch up with Tabata and ask him a few questions. What did he say? Well, after the game managed to sell quite well digitally and physically in North America and Japan, Tabata is thinking about the PC platform next for the sole purpose of mods and user generated quests. He stated...

I would like to try developing on PC to pursue a unique way of playing with PC-exclusive features like making your own quests and enjoying the world using things like mods.

Wow, now I have to say that that is a very crazy point of view for Tabata to hold on Final Fantasy XV. Many AAA studios don't like putting their games on PC for that very reason. One of the main reasons that EA and DICE have locked down Battlefield is that they claim that it's just too technically difficult for modders to mod the game (even though Delphi programmers from Russia reverse engineered the file encryption on GTA V so that gamers could inject mods into the game using custom built ASI scripts) the reality is that most people suspect that AAA games are locked down on PC to prevent modding.

If you compare most mods to the DLC made available from AAA publishers, you'll notice that oftentimes mods go over and beyond giving gamers way more than what you get for paying $15 for a DLC pack. In Call of Duty's case you oftentimes get a few weapons and two maps. If you look at the modding scene for games like Quake, The Elder Scrolls, Fallout, GTA and Project CARS you'll note that there are nearly countless mods featuring new ways to play and new maps to play on... all for free.

This kind of features coming to Final Fantasy XV would do exactly what Tabata states: open new worlds and quests for people to engage in. Heck, I wouldn't doubt it if people began rewriting the ending to better suit their own vision of how they would prefer the game to end.

Another reason that Tabata wants to see Final Fantasy XV on PC is because he wants to show gamers how the game looks running on a high-end rig. I'm sure he's not alone in wanting to see that given that Final Fantasy XV has to be scaled down greatly to run at decent frame-rates and resolution on the eighth-gen twins, but on a PC with an EVGA GTX 1080 and 32GB of OC Vengeance RAM the game could look like a whole other beast. I mean, I don't need to tell people what the graphical differences are between Crysis 1 on Xbox 360 and PS3 and Crysis 1 on a decked on gaming rig, right?

Also, could you imagine Final Fantasy XV with a 4K texture upgrade like those overhauls modders would do for Skyrim? That would look insane. I wouldn't doubt it if modders could manage to achieve parity with Kingsglaive: Final Fantasy XV. For now, it's just talk, but it's good to know that Tabata is serious about it.